Category: video

onBeing: Washington Post’s video experiment

onBeingJust found out about onBeing, the Washington Post’s experiment with video vignettes from ordinary people. onBeing’s Jennifer Crandall explains the purpose on the site as follows:

onBeing is a project based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better. What you’ll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence of who they are, who we are.

There will be a new video every Wednesday, so check back often. In the meantime, feel free to add your thoughts to the comments section and tell us about someone you’d like to see in onBeing. Over time, we should end up with a pretty cool community. — Jenn

I’ve just clicked on a couple of videos, so it’s too early for me to form a judgment. But my overall impression is that the videos, while interesting, are too long. But at least the people at the Post are trying something, so good for them.

Other views from blogdom:

Pro: “All in all, it has a very iTunes-like feel. Totally un-newspaper-like.”

Con: “It’s like some undergrad documentary project that’s not interesting enough to make it onto the 3 a.m. slot of a third tier cable network and not edgy enough to get noticed as modern art.”

Friday Five: Random Play

Five contextless links:

  • Some retailers in the UK are getting more traffic from social networking sites like MySpace than from search engines (Google being the 800-pound exception, of course). Hat tip: BeyondPR, who observes that marketers should “re-evaluate your online spend to include social networks.”
  • Just another crumby marketing ploy? Put your name on a piece of toast. Via Brand Infection.
  • If MySpace were a country it would be the 11th largest and other scary thoughts on globalization. YouTube presentation, via FlackLife.
  • Internet-based alumni relations is the latest entry in Michael Stoner‘s ongoing discussion with Andy Shaindlin, executive director of the Caltech Alumni Association (and blogger at Alumni Futures). The discussion gives new meaning to the idea of “high-tech, high-touch.” Says Shaindlin: “We estimate that on average we reach alumni with electronic ‘touches’ at least 15 times as frequently as we do face-to-face. And electronic contacts outnumber those via print by about 4:1.”
  • While YouTubing for references to our campus‘s annual St. Pat’s festivities, I discovered a fun 3-minute clip of the 1949 St. Pat’s Parade through downtown Rolla, Mo. The parade was shot with an 8-millimeter camera but is in color. The guy who posted it is a UMR graduate (history, 1970) and the film was taken by his father in law. This clip offers a glimpse into an unusual 99-year tradition of our campus. The weeklong celebration culminates with the parade downtown tomorrow.

    • Online video and the future of PR

    Jeremy Peppers of POP! PR fame nicely summarizes online video’s impact on communication in the social mediasphere. It’s a breathless, optimistic view of the future, with links galore. But Peppers cautions marketers about using video wisely.

    Rule No. 1: keep it away from the ad people.

    How should video be used? First, most importantly, it should be used when appropriate. In this social media rush, firms and corporations rush out to put everything together in one campaign. It does not make sense, though. Video is a great way to get your message across, but companies need to remember to have an honest voice, not messaging [emphasis mine]. It’s one of my lines about social media – hand it over to PR rather than advertising, because PR is used to talking TO people, not like advertising that just talks AT people.

    Well put. Also this: “[O]nly use video if it makes sense. New demo to showcase? Video it and post it in the newsroom and on YouTube. Just don’t try too hard, and it should be fine.”

    Friday Five: viral edition

    Viral is all the rage, it seems — in video, in marketing, in sickness. Or at least it’s enough of a rage to give me enough Friday Five fodder.

    • Let’s start off with SCADshorts, a viral video campaign developed by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Developed by the Dandy Dwarves, a group of SCAD alumni who put their video production education to work, the campaign consists of a series of oddball videos — one a month — that are part of a puzzle prospective students must solve in order to win an iPod. Morgan Davis of erelevant offers his take on this clever campaign.
    • More about viral video from Karine Joly, who discusses how Vancouver Film School made the most of one graduate’s video, “Piece of Mind” (YouTube link), by creating and releasing on YouTube it’s own “making of” video (YouTube link). “In this 7-minute video,” Karine writes, “VFS manages to let this talented student promotes the Canadian institution, its professors and its offering – all this done by presenting the work that went into ‘Piece of Mind.'”
    • Great writing, unfiltered. Seth Godin extols the benefits of infectious prose that is free from corporate filters, and creates a mini-virus by uncovering some pretty decent, linkable bloggage. “The filter,” Godin writes, “is important, sometimes. It keeps us focused and on time and from veering too far in the wrong direction. But in a Long Tail world, the filter is actually better off gone.”
    • In what we hope will become a viral campaign across campuses, 70 presidents of U.S. colleges and universities have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, a move to make college campuses more sustainable.
    • Virality is not confined to cyberspace. Take the underground press movement. It’s alive and well on a campus where you’d least expect it: right here at UMR, a predominantly engineering- and technology-oriented university. While the official student newspaper (The Missouri Miner) is threatening to sue the university and student council for cutting the paper’s budget, a group of students have created an alternative newspaper called The Mineshaft. (Tag line: “Where the real news is buried.”) This weekly publication sprang up in December. In the fine tradition of Soviet samizdat newspapers, The Mineshaft is printed on 8 1/2-by-11 paper, photocopied and distributed throughout campus. All the writers use pseudonyms, but according to the latest edition, that may change. (Writes Sybil, the editor in chief: “While we initially thought that anonymity would allow for all discussion to be on our content, we have found instead that the issue of who we are has just become even more controversial.”) The writing and reporting isn’t terrific — as I said, most of our students are here to study engineering, and we have no journalism program — but the spirit behind The Mineshaft is right.

    In other news: Anna Nicole Smith is still dead

    Yeah, I know this is supposed to be a blog about marketing higher education. But sometimes I just can’t help myself and I have to veer off topic just a bit. Today’s post is a case in point.

    In a post on Friday about the shame of American TV journalism, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine points to a ThinkProgress video compilation of “some of the many, many lowlights” of how network and cable news networks covered the death of Anna Nicole Smith compared to coverage of other important stories, such as the war in Iraq.

    The death of Anna Nicole Smith yesterday was a feeding frenzy for the national media, and coverage of the war was drowned out: NBC’s Nightly News devoted 14 seconds to Iraq compared to 3 minutes and 13 seconds to Anna Nicole. CNN referenced Anna Nicole 522% more frequently than it did Iraq. MSNBC was even worse — 708% more references to Anna Nicole than Iraq.

    Watch it and weep. Or let the numbers tell the story:

    References to Anna Nicole and Iraq on Cable Networks After 3PM ET:

    NETWORK ANNA NICOLE IRAQ
    CNN 141 27
    FOX NEWS 112 33
    MSNBC 170 24

    Time Of Segments Devoted to Anna Nicole and Iraq on Broadcast Networks:

    NETWORK ANNA NICOLE IRAQ
    NBC 3:13 0:14
    CBS 2:00 2:17
    ABC 2:21 2:58